Game Review: Battle Chasers Nightwar

Each party member has two different skill trees you can progress down, which specializes them in a certain direction. As an example, Knolan, your mage, can either become an arcane & healing master or go the route of specializing in elemental spells. Red Monika, your rogue, can specialize in crits and subtlety or become more of a fighter type.

The game takes elements of single player collection RPGs like Borderlands and Diablo by having you go through randomized farming dungeons multiple times. For its subsystems, it actually takes a lot of influence from World of Warcraft. Not only does it have an overall WoW kind of ‘vibe’, you have blacksmithing, herbalism, enchanting, all these secondary systems you would find in WoW. Those things are welcome enough. Although, WoW influence aside, if I were to pick one RPG this game reminds me of, it’s the Breath of Fire series from Capcom. The diversity of the cast, the world, the way you walk around, the feeling of the animations, the story itself, the fishing, it all feels very ‘Breath of Fire’.

As for the bad, there’s a decent amount of bad. I found myself desperate for a sprint button. Your characters run so slow. When I’m running across the map or backtracking my way through a dungeon, I feel like the game is aggressively wasting my time. Secondly, the controls were a big pain for me. I’m playing on PC and while the game could easily be played with just a mouse like Diablo, it forces me to use the keyboard and, not only that, some bizarre control scheme where I need to press Q, W, E, and R on a regular basis, requiring me to use both hands. It’s not that this is necessarily a problem in and of itself, it’s that it’s so unnecessary. There’s nothing about this game that couldn’t easily be controlled with a mouse, and there’s no way, as far as I can tell, to modify the key bindings.

The difficulty also spikes pretty dramatically after about the 3rd dungeon, and not in an engaging way — in a ‘go farm through dungeons three or four times to level up and get better gear’ kind of way, which feels like a way to artificially pad the time it takes to get through a playthrough. This makes sense in say, a mobile game, which is siphoning money out of you to break through difficulty walls, or a subscription game like WoW that wants to stretch content as far as it can go, but here it feels unwelcome, at least when you’re only about a third or halfway through the story.